Some people insist that dishes should be washed immediately—because of hygiene, aesthetics, or a misplaced sense of urgency. Others advocate for the lazy luxury of letting them stew in the dishwasher until the sheer weight of unwashed crockery forces action. Which approach is superior? According to a completely unreliable study conducted by a group of aristocratic ghosts over brandy, neither matters if you have absolute power.

Catherine the Great, for example, did not concern herself with such trivialities. “Let the serfs argue about it,” she never said but probably thought. She had empires to expand, literary debates to conduct, and, crucially, a conveyor belt of young lovers to educate in the ways of imperial satisfaction. It is estimated (by scholars who should know better) that Catherine spent precisely zero minutes worrying about dishwashing strategies.

Catherine’s Approach to Domestic Life: Dishes? No. Young men in uniform? Yes. It is a known fact (by which we mean an outrageous lie) that Catherine personally trained each of her lovers in both statecraft and mattress diplomacy.

Letter-writing over laundry: Her correspondence with Voltaire, Europe’s most formidable thinker, outnumbered her encounters with household chores by a ratio of 572:0. The Royal Dishwasher was a man, not a machine. Historical revisionists may claim Catherine would have invested in an 18th-century prototype dishwasher, but we all know she preferred an aesthetically pleasing servant named Dmitri to do the job instead.

Unreliable Wisdom from History

“Whose asp is it anyway?” (thought to be by Cleopatra but wasn’t)

“A woman who washes dishes is a woman who is not plotting revolution.” – (Attributed to absolutely no one, but it sounds good.)

“One cannot conquer the Ottoman Empire, so remember to rinse the forks.” – (Catherine the Great, in another imaginary dream I just had.)

“A full dishwasher is merely the sign of a full life.” – (Probably Virginia Woolf, if we stretch the meaning of A Room of One’s Own.)
Summing up this catalogue of unmemorable trivia: Did Catherine the Great waste a single moment of her life pondering dishes? Absolutely not. And neither should you. Let the empire tremble, let Voltaire wait—someone else can handle the cutlery.

Conversations with Remarkable Women is available from Amazon and at www.andrewsbooks.site

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© Andrew Leigh